*Inaugural Conference of Arendt in Aberdeen 2022-24 series.
Location: Seminar Room 224, Sir Duncan Rice Library, Second Floor, University of Aberdeen,
Date and time: June 23 @ 9:00 am – June 24 @ 3:00 pm
Registration is now open here.
Please see conference programme below this post.
2022 – 2024 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s semesters at the University of Aberdeen and her celebrated Gifford Lectures, delivered here between 1972 and 1974. Arendt was the first woman to contribute to this prestigious practical theology lecture series, established in 1888. The lectures were later published as The Life of the Mind.
To mark this important anniversary, the University will hold a series of events to explore the contemporary relevance of Arendt’s thought, which now pervades a variety of disciplines in the arts, social sciences and beyond.
The series will commence with the conference on Council Democracy as An Alternative to Representative Democracy, by which we are exploring council democracy as a form of government, its applications throughout time and space, its contemporary revival in political theory, and its implications in relation to the nation-state and the concept of sovereignty.
Arendt’s enthusiastic promotion of “the council system” – particularly in her major work On Revolution – has been a matter of controversy in scholarship. Her political thought has often been described as classical or civic republican, and in line with the idea and institutions of liberal representative democracy. Yet, her council system is a bottom-up political organization which serves as an alternative form of government to centralized, bureaucratic forms of government, and to the party system. It centres on the notion of public freedom, a form of political liberty exercised by face-to-face communities through direct political action in public spaces open to all. The council system, for Arendt, is the foundation of a federation based on small-scale autonomous councils, as the only alternatives to representative democracy and the claim to sovereignty of the nation-state.
Council democracy is a timely topic because this aspect of Arendt’s political thought, and its relation to her larger corpus, has been understudied in Arendt scholarship, while it has inspired contemporary political initiatives from Occupy to the Rojava Revolution in Syrian Kurdistan.
We invited leading scholars of council democracy to discuss this form of government in Arendt’s writings, in its historical instantiations, and in the works and agendas of contemporary political theorists, movements, and activists. Please register here for the conference as the number of seats are limited.
For information about travel and about the city and region, see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/maps/index.php.
The conference is organised by Dr Hanifi Baris and Dr Trevor Stack; hosted by the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL); and funded by the Leverhulme Fund Early Career Fellowship grant and CISRUL. Questions should be directed to hanifi.baris@abdn.ac.uk
Keynotes are Prof Maria Tamboukou, University of East London; Dr James Muldoon, University of Exeter; and Prof Roger Berkowitz, Bard College & Hannah Arendt Center.
Keynote Speakers:
Prof Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, UK. She has held visiting research positions in a number of institutions in the UK and overseas and is a member of the Scientific Board of the ‘Hannah Arendt’ Centre for Political Studies at the University of Verona, Italy. Her latest book Revisiting the nomadic subject was published in 2021. See Prof Tamboukou’s website for more details: https://mariatamboukou.org
Dr James Muldoon is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Exeter and Head of Digital Research at the think tank Autonomy. He is author of Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech (Pluto, 2022) and Building Power to Change the World: The Political Thought of the German Council Movements (OUP, 2020). See Dr Muldoon’s profile for more details: https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/politics/staff/muldoon/
Prof Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany. See Prof Berkowitz’s website for more details: https://www.vernunft.org/
Conference Programme
23 June 2022, Thursday
9:00 – 9:15 Registration, Tea & Coffee
9:15 – 9:30 Opening Remarks
Dr Helen Lynch & Prof Michael Brown, University of Aberdeen
9:30 – 12:30 Session 1 – Conceptualisations of council democracy
Session chair: Prof Michael Brown, University of Aberdeen
9:30 – 10:30 Keynote speech: Hannah Arendt and the “Glorious” European Labour Movement
Dr James Muldoon, University of Exeter
10:30 – 10:45 Break
10:45 – 11:00 Hannah Arendt, Council Democracy and (Far) Beyond: A Radical View
Dr Matteo Bortolini, The University of Padua
11:00 – 11:15 The promises and possibilities of Arendt’s council system
Dr Shmuel Lederman, University of Haifa
11:15 – 11:30 The possibility for the new and the unexpected in politics: nuances between McIntyre and Arendt
Dr Joel Pierce, University of Aberdeen
11:30 – 12:30 Discussion
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 16:30 Session 2 – The constitution of freedom in council democracy
Session chair: Dr Hanifi Baris, University of Aberdeen
13:30 – 14:30 Keynote speech: On Constitutional Council Governance
Prof Roger Berkowitz, Bard College & Hannah Arendt Center
14:30 – 14:45 Break
14:45 – 15:00 Arendtian Constituent Power
Shree Agnihotri, London School of Economics
15:00 – 15:15 Councils: Plurality as a Prerequisite, Federation as a Consequence
Dr Wolfgang Heuer, Free University Berlin
15:15 – 15:30 Arendt’s Council Democracy and the American Federalists: Two Rival Visions of Federalism
Dr Devrim Sezer & Dr Ünsal Doğan Başkır, Izmir University of Economics
15:30 – 15:45 Council democracy in local elections? A case of constitutio libertatis in Commercy, France
Sixtine Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, Catholic University of Louvain
15:45 – 16:45 Discussion
16:45 – 17:00 Break
17:00 – 18:00 Roundtable discussion: the political promise & possibility of an Arendtian council democracy
Session chair: Dr Rachel Shanks, University of Aberdeen
19:00 Dinner
24 June 2022, Friday
9:00 – 9:15 Registration, Tea & Coffee
9:15 – 12:30 Session 3 – Council democracy in motion: Arendtian moments & experiments with the council system
Session chair: Dr Trevor Stack, University of Aberdeen
9:15 – 10:15 Keynote speech: Politicogenetic phenomena: Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg and their feminist interlocutors
Prof Maria Tamboukou, University of East London
10:15 – 10:30 Break
10:30 – 10:45 Incorporating the demos through the council system in contemporary democracies: from the 15M in Spain to the Chilean constitutional assembly
Prof Cristina Sanchez, Autonomous University of Madrid
10:45 – 11:00 From Chile to Turkey: The Communal Councils and Resistance Committees of 1970s as praxis of Council Democracy
Dr Kumru Toktamış, Pratt Institute
11:00 – 11:15 The Treasure of Revolution: Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan
Dr Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University
11:15 – 11:30 Council democracy as a mode of autonomy: a comparison of democratic innovations in Mexico and Kurdistan
Dr Hanif Baris, University of Aberdeen
11:30 – 12:30 Discussion
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 – 15:00 Concluding discussion & closing remarks
Dr Trevor Stack, University of Aberdeen